My apologies for the late post; I highly recommend Clear internet!…if you have a penchant for frustrating, mostly down internet connections.

Anyway, admittedly my LexiConquest ambitions were mildly deterred this week, what with the amazing ANIMATION CHALLENGE that occurred Friday Midnight to Saturday Midnight. A big portion of my time was spent getting Billy’s face rig up and running for the sake of creating a rapid fire animation. The end result was less than stellar but that’s not really because of the rig. Would Billy hold up in a feature length film? Probably not. Is the facial rig good enough for what is needed in LexiConquest? Totally.

Other than that, the run of the mill work flow progressed:

King Arthur

King Arthur is looking more unified in terms of modeling, and I’m fairly pleased with how well all the cloth-without-cloth solvers are turning out. Please note textures are temporary; they’ll be finalized for next week.

Time: 5 hours Percentage Done: Modeling: 90% Texturing: 50%

Billy Pilgrim

As mentioned, Billy’s head is totally and completely ready to go. Rigging has begun on the body as well, with a head-to-toe-rig being integrated, which I should be ready to show next week. For now, a basic skeleton has been implemented with some first pass weight painting. The Tralfalmadoran is a bit further along:

tralFal_rigTest.jpg
Still to do on tral: paint and set up fingers, eye, and implement “Stretchy Limb” spine. Ideally, I will have both done this week so that animation may begin next week.

Hours Spent 15-20 Percentage Done: 25%

Week seven already, time has been moving so quickly. We are happy to say that we are feeling good about our progress. Characters have begun to move into the rigging phase of their development. The Library is nearly completely modeled and will be textured in the coming weeks.

MIKE: Rigging Tin Man and continuing on Library assets.

BEN: ***BEN IS CURRENT WITHOUT INTERNETS (like in the stone age or something) HE WILL POST AS SOON AS POSSIBLE*** This week Ben has been working on King Arthur’s head and rigging Billy Pilgrim.

LAUREN: Has rigged and has the major part of the weighting finished for Tiny Tim. Detailing of Robin Hood’s costume was also worked on.

HESSAM: Facial rigging of Robin Hood, and continue rigging his body.

JASON: Modeling and texturing Tripod.

TRACY: Frankenstein’s Lightning card effect and more work on Deus Ex Machina and Graveyard Daemon

I spent this week completing the modeling of the Tripod. Since the last two weeks have been spent coding and working on the hardware side of things Tripod wasn’t touched. This week I have completed the modeling of the Tripod and started the texturing process. All the textures are currently clean but I may dirty them up based on feedback this week. As you can see all the textures are shiny metal textures. The main body is brushed aluminum while the legs are painted metal and stainless steel with a small bit of rubber accordion towards the bottom of the legs. The top of the body is a bent up sheet brushed aluminum sheet metal which may or may not stay that way based on feedback. Below you can see the model from multiple angles. The middle rendering is of the body without the bent up sheet metal.

Tripod Time: 20 hours  % Done: 85%

This week I took a break from coding and worked mostly on the Frankenstein’s Lightning card effect.  I really wanted to find another alternative to Maya’s built in effects for this lightning, but as of right now that all I’ve really been able to come up with.  I’m definitely open to suggestions and tutorials, but as of right now I think the lightning looks pretty believable and fits in line with the other cards.  Currently I’m using a mixture of the Maya Lightning effect to strike the card and then paint effects to create additional lightning zig zags around the card.  I’ll be compositing the paint effects into the render (images below)

I also worked more on getting the fire from the Graveyard Daemon card to surround the card and collide with it.  I’m in the process of rendering this out and will find a way to post this either to the PPJ or add it to digmfiles and will put a link up here.

I took a break from coding this week since we’re ahead of schedule on that, but will get back to it as soon as I make more headway with my card effects.  Two more to go!

Overall I worked about 15 hours this week. I am 80% done with the lightning effect, I just need to work on the timing a bit more, and compositing the lightning together. If I receive constructive feedback about this effect I have no problem re-working it. A good potion of my time was spent trying to find other ways of achieving realistic lightning, but none of them panned out. The rest of my time was spent fine tuning the other effects.

This week I have focused on rigging Tin Man and some more Library assets.

I spent about 12 hours on the Tin Man rig so far and I have the basic structure there and I attached the skin earlier today. You can view a quick video of it here.

I would call the rig about 75% done. I plan to put all my efforts for Monday and Tuesday to weight painting. Then the model goes back to Ben for animation. Next week I will have another video for you to see the rig with weights painted.

Below are some more of images of the library assets including a redesigned door, floating TV, and a floating table. I am also finishing up a floating shelf, with these last additions the assets for the library should all be in place.

In all I spent another 10 hours or so working on modeling, the Library is looking to be about 90-95% done in terms of assets.

This week I completed the rig for Tiny Tim as well as the majority of the weighting. There definitely need to be some minor tweaks in the weights around the elbows as I animate, but that was the only area I had any issues. The main reason that the weighting took so long was that I had to restart a couple times after the rig “exploded” in jagged geometry, or the program crashed. As I had never rigged anything (with the exception of a couple robots and a marionette) this was only the second organic and the first humanoid rig I had attempted. The last thing to add will be the hair, and then Tim’s attack, defeat and neutral animations can be completed.

Posed model

The rig took about 9 hours to complete and is 100% finished.The weighting took 5 hours and is 95% done.

Rig

I also put together Tiny Tim’s Mitten Textures, visible in the completed and rigged model.. It took 1 hour and is 100% complete.

rigTest

There was mention of Tiny Tim’s eyes looking a bit too doll-like, so I took the opportunity to model hum some new eyes. They are shaped more like a human’s eye and have a transparent blinn providing the shine and reflection of the cornea, and a modified sphere with a lambert providing the geometry to allow the pupil to dilate.

rigTest – eyes

That took 1.5 hours between the simple rig and the remodeling\texturing.

New eyes

Towards the end of the week,  Hessam passed me his Robin Hood model and I began to add some detail to elements of his costume. I just need to do the holder for his dagger, and then I can take those normal maps and Tiny Tim’s and export them all in one go.

The detailing took about 5 hours and is 87% finished.

Robin Hood's hood

Robin Hood's glove

Robin Hood's satchel

Robin Hood's dagger

Robin Hood's belt

Week 7 already! The goal for this week was to start working on rigging the characters. I spent most of the last week finishing up the blend shape for my character and rigging his body which took most of my time. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to work on the template of the website, since I had to educate myself for rigging. As I mentioned the blend shape is done and I am very pleased with it. Here is a playblast of the result:
blend shape Playblast

Hours: 15 Percentage: 100% (of facial rigging)

I spent 2 days research on rigging the characters, and spent a whole day to finish the skeleton for Robin  Hood . There are some minore issues that need to be addressed, and they can be done in half a day. Below is the screen shot of the riggs:

I was expecting this to take more than 3 days, and our deadline for rigging our characters is two weeks. Now I can spend the next week making the rigg more flexible, and also paint the weight which requires a lot of time and patience.  Speaking of which, I attached the body to the joints, and it seems to work fairly good with the default weights for arm and finger joints. I need to work on other part of the body, and of course the website. Here is a playblast of the character with the default weights:

rigg Playblast

Hours: 25 Percentage: 50% (of rigging the body)